When you play baseball and you strike out looking do you ever think “Man that was a terrible call!” Well a lot of people are feeling that right now in the MLB considering bad calls have been the worst they have ever been in the MLB ever. According to BU Today MLB Umpires had 34,294 Missed Ball-Strike Calls in 2018. The calls are so bad that they are actually considering having an automatic strike zone. The question is, “Should we advance technology a step risking the automatic strike zone failing and the MLB getting hate or should they stay with human umpires and the umpires making way too many mistakes. 

I interviewed two people who are very knowledgeable of baseball. They also play for the local traveling baseball team, and have been playing baseball for seven years and they said this. I asked them both what they would do if they got to choose and they both said they would keep the human umpires. One of the people that were interviewed, Brody Parks, who has played baseball since he was seven years old said that he would think that the automatic strike zone would not be advanced enough to make the calls. He also would wonder how they would call the plays at home without a home plate umpire. The other person that was interviewed, Jack Nicholls, had a solution to the problem stating that we could have a human umpire behind the plate just to call plays at home and anything else he needs to call that involved what he did when he was a normal umpire besides calling balls and strikes. 

According to BU today “Each season, MLB home plate umpires make tens of thousands of incorrect calls (read on for evidence backing up that assertion). These controllable errors impact players, managers, batters, pitchers, performance statistics, game outcomes, and even the big business of fantasy baseball.” 

This also affects other people because they could be doing a fantasy baseball league every year for a sizable amount of money. But if the MLB took umpires away it would ruin an aspect of the game. It would make the game not as fun and interesting. Like you have your favorite umpires, your least favorite umpires, and even when an umpire makes a call and you don’t agree with it you boo him. It is just all part of the game. 

So next time you are watching a baseball game and an umpire makes a bad call just think about what would happen if the umpires were removed for a computer. 

Web source https://www.bu.edu/articles/2019/mlb-umpires-strike-zone-accuracy/